Feature engineering for electricity load forecasting

The purpose of this notebook is to demonstrate how to use skrub and polars to perform feature engineering for electricity load forecasting.

We will build a set of features from different sources:

• Historical weather data for 10 medium to large urban areas in France;

• Holidays and calendar features for France;

• Historical electricity load data for the whole of France.

All these data sources cover a time range from March 23, 2021 to May 31, 2025.

Since our maximum forecasting horizon is 24 hours, we consider that the future weather data is known at a chosen prediction time. Similarly, the holidays and calendar features are known at prediction time for any point in the future.

Therefore, features derived from the weather and calendar data can be used to engineer “future covariates”. Since the load data is our prediction target, we will can also use it to engineer “past covariates” such as lagged features and rolling aggregations.

Environment setup

We need to install some extra dependencies for this notebook if needed (when running jupyterlite). We need the development version of skrub to be able to use the skrub expressions.

%pip install -q https://pypi.anaconda.org/ogrisel/simple/polars/1.24.0/polars-1.24.0-cp39-abi3-emscripten_3_1_58_wasm32.whl
%pip install -q altair holidays https://pypi.anaconda.org/ogrisel/simple/skrub/0.6.dev0/skrub-0.6.dev0-py3-none-any.whl

ERROR: polars-1.24.0-cp39-abi3-emscripten_3_1_58_wasm32.whl is not a supported wheel on this platform.

Note: you may need to restart the kernel to use updated packages.

Note: you may need to restart the kernel to use updated packages.

# The following 3 imports are only needed to workaround some limitations
# when using polars in a pyodide/jupyterlite notebook.
import tzdata  # noqa: F401
import pandas as pd
from pyarrow.parquet import read_table

import polars as pl
import skrub
from pathlib import Path
import holidays

Time range

Let’s define a hourly time range from March 23, 2021 to May 31, 2025 that will be used to join the electricity load data and the weather data. The time range is in UTC timezone to avoid any ambiguity when joining with the weather data that is also in UTC.

We wrap the polars dataframe in a skrub variable to benefit from the built-in TableReport display in the notebook. Using the skrub expression system will also be useful later.

time_range_start = pl.datetime(2021, 3, 23, hour=0, time_zone="UTC")
time_range_end = pl.datetime(2025, 5, 31, hour=23, time_zone="UTC")
time = skrub.var(
    "time",
    pl.DataFrame().with_columns(
        pl.datetime_range(
            start=time_range_start,
            end=time_range_end,
            time_zone="UTC",
            interval="1h",
        ).alias("time"),
    ),
)
time

<Var 'time'>

Show graph

Result:

Please enable javascript

The skrub table reports need javascript to display correctly. If you are displaying a report in a Jupyter notebook and you see this message, you may need to re-execute the cell or to trust the notebook (button on the top right or "File > Trust notebook").

To avoid network issues when running this notebook, the necessary data files have already been downloaded and saved in the datasets folder. See the README.md file for instructions to download the data manually if you want to re-run this notebook with more recent data.

data_source_folder = Path("../datasets")
for data_file in sorted(data_source_folder.iterdir()):
    print(data_file)

../datasets/README.md
../datasets/Total Load - Day Ahead _ Actual_202101010000-202201010000.csv
../datasets/Total Load - Day Ahead _ Actual_202201010000-202301010000.csv
../datasets/Total Load - Day Ahead _ Actual_202301010000-202401010000.csv
../datasets/Total Load - Day Ahead _ Actual_202401010000-202501010000.csv
../datasets/Total Load - Day Ahead _ Actual_202501010000-202601010000.csv
../datasets/weather_bayonne.parquet
../datasets/weather_brest.parquet
../datasets/weather_lille.parquet
../datasets/weather_limoges.parquet
../datasets/weather_lyon.parquet
../datasets/weather_marseille.parquet
../datasets/weather_nantes.parquet
../datasets/weather_paris.parquet
../datasets/weather_strasbourg.parquet
../datasets/weather_toulouse.parquet

List of 10 medium to large urban areas to approximately cover most regions in France with a slight focus on most populated regions that are likely to drive electricity demand.

city_names = [
    "paris",
    "lyon",
    "marseille",
    "toulouse",
    "lille",
    "limoges",
    "nantes",
    "strasbourg",
    "brest",
    "bayonne",
]

all_city_weather_raw = {}
for city_name in city_names:
    all_city_weather_raw[city_name] = skrub.var(
        f"{city_name}_weather_raw",
        pl.from_arrow(read_table(f"../datasets/weather_{city_name}.parquet")),
    ).with_columns(
        [
            pl.col("time").dt.cast_time_unit(
                "us"
            ),  # Ensure time column has the same type
        ]
    )

all_city_weather_raw["brest"]

<CallMethod 'with_columns'>

Show graph

Result:

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all_city_weather_raw["brest"].drop_nulls(subset=["temperature_2m"])

<CallMethod 'drop_nulls'>

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Result:

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time.join(all_city_weather_raw["brest"], on="time", how="inner")

<CallMethod 'join'>

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Result:

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all_city_weather = time
for city_name, city_weather_raw in all_city_weather_raw.items():
    all_city_weather = all_city_weather.join(
        city_weather_raw.rename(lambda x: x if x == "time" else x + "_" + city_name),
        on="time",
        how="inner",
    )

all_city_weather

<CallMethod 'join'>

Show graph

Result:

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Calendar and holidays features

We leverage the holidays package to enrich the time range with some calendar features such as public holidays in France. We also add some features that are useful for time series forecasting such as the day of the week, the day of the year, and the hour of the day.

Note that the holidays package requires us to extract the date for the French timezone.

Similarly for the calendar features: all the time features are extracted from the time in the French timezone.

holidays_fr = holidays.country_holidays("FR", years=range(2019, 2026))

fr_time = pl.col("time").dt.convert_time_zone("Europe/Paris")
calendar = time.with_columns(
    [
        fr_time.dt.date().is_in(holidays_fr.keys()).alias("is_holiday_fr"),
        fr_time.dt.weekday().alias("day_of_week_fr"),
        fr_time.dt.ordinal_day().alias("day_of_year_fr"),
        fr_time.dt.hour().alias("hour_of_day_fr"),
    ],
)
calendar

<CallMethod 'with_columns'>

Show graph

Result:

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Electricity load data

Finally we load the electricity load data. This data will both be used as a target variable but also to craft some lagged and window-aggregated features.

load_data_files = [
    data_file
    for data_file in sorted(data_source_folder.iterdir())
    if data_file.name.startswith("Total Load - Day Ahead")
    and data_file.name.endswith(".csv")
]

electricity_raw = skrub.var(
    "electricity_raw",
    pl.concat(
        [
            pl.from_pandas(pd.read_csv(data_file, na_values=["N/A", "-"])).drop(
                ["Day-ahead Total Load Forecast [MW] - BZN|FR"]
            )
            for data_file in load_data_files
        ],
        how="vertical",
    ),
)
electricity_raw

<Var 'electricity_raw'>

Show graph

Result:

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electricity = (
    electricity_raw.with_columns(
        [
            pl.col("Time (UTC)")
            .str.split(by=" - ")
            .list.first()
            .str.to_datetime("%d.%m.%Y %H:%M", time_zone="UTC")
            .alias("time"),
        ]
    )
    .drop(["Time (UTC)"])
    .rename({"Actual Total Load [MW] - BZN|FR": "load_mw"})
    .filter(pl.col("time").dt.minute().eq(0))
    .filter(pl.col("time") >= time_range_start)
    .filter(pl.col("time") <= time_range_end)
    .select(["time", "load_mw"])
)
electricity

<CallMethod 'select'>

Show graph

Result:

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electricity.filter(pl.col("load_mw").is_null())

<CallMethod 'filter'>

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Result:

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electricity.filter(
    (pl.col("time") > pl.datetime(2021, 10, 30, hour=10, time_zone="UTC"))
    & (pl.col("time") < pl.datetime(2021, 10, 31, hour=10, time_zone="UTC"))
).skb.eval().plot.line(x="time:T", y="load_mw:Q")

electricity = electricity.with_columns([pl.col("load_mw").interpolate()])
electricity.filter(
    (pl.col("time") > pl.datetime(2021, 10, 30, hour=10, time_zone="UTC"))
    & (pl.col("time") < pl.datetime(2021, 10, 31, hour=10, time_zone="UTC"))
).skb.eval().plot.line(x="time:T", y="load_mw:Q")

Check that the number of rows matches our expectations based on the number of hours that separate the first and the last dates. We can do that by joining with the time range dataframe and checking that the number of rows stays the same.

assert (
    time.join(electricity, on="time", how="inner").shape[0] == time.shape[0]
).skb.eval()

# ## Lagged features
#
# We can now create some lagged features from the electricity load data. We

# We will create 3 hourly lagged features, 1 daily lagged feature, and 1 weekly
# lagged feature. We will also create a rolling median and inter-quartile
# feature over the last 24 hours and over the last 7 days.

def iqr(col, *, window_size: int):
    """Inter-quartile range (IQR) of a column."""
    return col.rolling_quantile(0.75, window_size=window_size) - col.rolling_quantile(
        0.25, window_size=window_size
    )


electricity_lagged = electricity.with_columns(
    [pl.col("load_mw").shift(i).alias(f"load_mw_lag_{i}h") for i in range(1, 4)]
    + [
        pl.col("load_mw").shift(24).alias("load_mw_lag_1d"),
        pl.col("load_mw").shift(24 * 7).alias("load_mw_lag_1w"),
        pl.col("load_mw")
        .rolling_median(window_size=24)
        .alias("load_mw_rolling_median_24h"),
        pl.col("load_mw")
        .rolling_median(window_size=24 * 7)
        .alias("load_mw_rolling_median_7d"),
        iqr(pl.col("load_mw"), window_size=24).alias("load_mw_iqr_24h"),
        iqr(pl.col("load_mw"), window_size=24 * 7).alias("load_mw_iqr_7d"),
    ],
)
time.join(electricity_lagged, on="time", how="inner")

<CallMethod 'join'>

Show graph

Result:

Please enable javascript

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import altair


altair.Chart(
    electricity_lagged.tail(100).skb.eval()
).transform_fold(
    [
        "load_mw",
        "load_mw_lag_1h",
        "load_mw_lag_2h",
        "load_mw_lag_3h",
        "load_mw_lag_1d",
        "load_mw_lag_1w",
        "load_mw_rolling_median_24h",
        "load_mw_rolling_median_7d",
        "load_mw_iqr_24h",
        "load_mw_iqr_7d",
    ],
    as_=["key", "load_mw"],
).mark_line(
    tooltip=True
).encode(
    x="time:T", y="load_mw:Q", color="key:N"
).interactive()

Investigating outliers in the lagged features

from skrub import TableReport

TableReport(electricity_lagged.skb.eval())

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Please enable javascript

The skrub table reports need javascript to display correctly. If you are displaying a report in a Jupyter notebook and you see this message, you may need to re-execute the cell or to trust the notebook (button on the top right or "File > Trust notebook").

electricity_lagged.filter(pl.col("load_mw_iqr_7d") > 15_000)[
    "time"
].dt.date().unique().sort().to_list().skb.eval()

[datetime.date(2021, 12, 26),
 datetime.date(2021, 12, 27),
 datetime.date(2021, 12, 28),
 datetime.date(2022, 1, 7),
 datetime.date(2022, 1, 8),
 datetime.date(2023, 1, 19),
 datetime.date(2023, 1, 20),
 datetime.date(2023, 1, 21),
 datetime.date(2024, 1, 10),
 datetime.date(2024, 1, 11),
 datetime.date(2024, 1, 12),
 datetime.date(2024, 1, 13)]

all_city_weather.filter(
        (pl.col("time") > pl.datetime(2021, 12, 1, time_zone="UTC"))
        & (pl.col("time") < pl.datetime(2021, 12, 31, time_zone="UTC"))
).skb.eval().plot.line(
    x="time:T",
    y="temperature_2m_paris:Q",
)

altair.Chart(
    electricity_lagged.filter(
        (pl.col("time") > pl.datetime(2021, 12, 1, time_zone="UTC"))
        & (pl.col("time") < pl.datetime(2021, 12, 31, time_zone="UTC"))
    ).skb.eval()
).transform_fold(
    [
        "load_mw",
        "load_mw_iqr_7d",
    ],
).mark_line(
    tooltip=True
).encode(
    x="time:T", y="value:Q", color="key:N"
).interactive()